Lars Müller Publishers, 2024
English texts by Forrest Gander
8×12 inches / 20.3 cm x 30.5 cm
144 pages, 72 illustrations
Hardcover
ISBN 978-3-03778-760-1
Printed in Germany
Available from the Publisher
distributed by ARTBOOK / D.A.P
signed copies available form the artist
GROUND
In Lukas Felzmann’s singular photographs of each of California’s 58 counties, we encounter the world without us, but marked everywhere by our signs. It is a peculiarly silent world, but any photograph of a place is also a photograph of a muted soundscape, a site of intermingled scents and textures we’re given to imagine.
For the most part, Felzmann’s images are undelimited by skyline. If there are horizons, they are terrestrial ones, because the photographs are taken up almost entirely by the ground, a ground immersed in itself but saturated with the residue of human activity. Felzmann’s images are indifferent to the kind of pictorial beauty intended to trigger our aesthetic experience of amazement. Instead, they show us very directly “what is,” a horizontal series of formal and topographical relationships that are dependent on an unseen verticality, an invisible substrate. Ground directs our attention to the overlooked fundament, the stark composite face of nature and culture, where the animate and inanimate undergo their intimate encounter.
Forrest Gander